Re: (For the Wikipedia article) Algorithms and format

Hi Giovanni,

On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 01:56:13PM +0100, Giovanni Piredda wrote:
> >However you need also to add that the \extern primitive allows to
> >access these computational capabilities with an underlying
> >scripting language. Here the comparison can be made with HTML/JS.
> 
> And the native macro system too pushes one outside the markup system, right?

One has to distinguish between the 'syntax' of a document
(the way a parser should understand it) and its actual 'semantics'.
The _syntax_ of TeXmacs documents is relatively simple:
anyone can write a parser for TeXmacs documents.
The semantics of TeXmacs is more complex,
since you may need to evaluate macros or extern constructs.
The same holds for Html+Javascript.

In the case of TeX/LaTeX, there is no clean distinction between
syntax and semantics, whence the problems for parsing and converting LaTeX.

> Finally, for my remark that TeX is the easiest to read "markup" that
> I know, it occurred to me that the format of computer algebra
> systems is still easier to read; but perhaps it is not comprehensive
> enough to be used for typesetting a document, and if you include
> more syntactic expressions so that it is, it becomes as difficult to
> read as TeX at least. Maybe I will experiment a bit with
> Mathematica, which as far as I remember can format mathematical
> expressions as well; I need to express all input in linear form of
> course otherwise it is easier to read but the comparison is unfair ;-)

This is getting more and more off-topic.

Best wishes, --Joris

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